With its endless governmental and quasi-governmental conspiracies and its sci-fi technology, NIKITA has always flirted with sheer silliness, and in its Season 3 finale the show went all the way.  Its ratings have also flirted with cancellation, and that came close to happening too:  the series will barely be coming back, for an as-yet […]

  KING & MAXWELL isn’t the kind of show you’d particularly expect to see evolve between its premiere and season finale, and in fact it didn’t.  That’s too bad, because the TNT series, developed by Shane Brennan and based on characters created by novelist David Baldacci, was badly in need of improvement.  It may be […]

  After three seasons on the air, it seems fair to say that–paraphrasing Star Wars—Homeland isn’t the show we were looking for.  That doesn’t make it a bad series, or an unentertaining one.  But it’s not the successor to Mad Men and Breaking Bad in the pantheon of truly great television dramas that it at […]

  In its third season, HOUSE OF LIES tried to have more substance than it did in previous years, and part of the time it worked.  The end of Season 2 had scattered the cast, with Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) forming his own consulting shop, while the members of his “pod,” Jeannie (Kristen Bell), Clyde […]

  For the most part, Shonda Rhimes and the Season 10 finale of GREY’S ANATOMY kept its Cristina Yang Farewell Extravaganza confined to a 20-minute chunk in the second half.  The opening half of the hour, written by Co-Executive Producer William Harper and directed by Tony Phelan, was concerned with an explosion at a shopping […]

  DOMINION has performed well enough in the ratings that there’s a fair chance of it being renewed (especially since it’s evidently produced on the cheap).  This is fairly remarkable, since even by the currently debased standards of Syfy, the post-apocalyptic Biblical sci-fi fantasy is notably awful (it makes its lead-in, the merely not-bad Defiance, […]

  The MTV version of SCREAM nailed its own problem back in the pilot, courtesy of its one-man meta machine Noah (John Karna)–but diagnosing one’s own illness is a long way from curing it.  A TV series, indeed, can’t possibly duplicate the experience of a slasher movie, because that genre plays a numbers game:  its […]

  FOX’s PITCH, co-creator Dan Fogelman’s (with Rick Singer) “other” fall series–he also has a little project called This Is Us–is a modestly engaging drama that deserves another, you know, at bat.  Unfortunately, “modest” also describes its ratings–and that’s being kind–so fill in your further baseball analogies here about tonight’s season finale being two outs […]